Category: Food Service Software

March is National Nutrition Month. Throughout the month, USDA will be highlighting results of our efforts to improve access to safe, healthy food for all Americans and supporting the health of our next generation.

About half of all American adults—117 million individuals—have one or more preventable chronic diseases, many of which are related to poor quality eating patterns and physical inactivity. These include cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, and poor bone health. More than two-thirds of adults and nearly one-third of children and youth are overweight or obese. Trends in food intake show that Americans are not consuming healthy eating patterns.

Earlier this year, the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and the US Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion released the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Written for use by health professionals and policy makers, the Dietary Guidelines is released every 5 years to provide nutrition guidance for Americans age 2 and older to prevent diet-related chronic disease and maintain health.

The Healthy Eating Index (HEI) measures how the nation’s food choices align with the Dietary Guidelines. The nation’s current HEI score is 59 out of 100. The HEI score in previous years was even lower. At the same time, diet-related chronic disease rates over the last 25 years have risen and remain high. Given the robust science behind the Dietary Guidelines, it is not an understatement to suggest that if we were to eat closer to the Dietary Guidelines – and saw our nation’s HEI scores get closer to 100 – we would see reductions in the prevalence of diet-related chronic disease.

HEI-2010 scores for the U.S. population, 1999-2012

With each edition of the Dietary Guidelines, the HEI is updated to align with the most recent nutrition recommendations. The current version is HEI-2010 and scores the average American diet based on intakes of total fruit, whole fruit, total vegetables, greens and beans, whole and refined grains, total protein foods, seafood and plant-based protein foods, sodium, and calories from solid fats, added sugar, and alcohol beyond a moderate level. The tool is being updated to reflect the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines released in January.

Monitoring scores in the U.S. population is one of many applications of the HEI. An HEI score can be calculated for any defined set of foods including dietary intake data, menus at restaurants, and a market basket of foods. Use of the HEI can apply to surveillance, policy, epidemiologic, clinical and behavioral research.

More than 200 scientific publications have featured the use of the HEI. The number and scope of publications continue to grow each year, with nearly 90 papers published in 2015 alone. A majority of studies published over the years have examined the association between overall diet quality and health outcomes. Examples of health outcomes studied have included cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dental health, and ocular health. Researchers are also interested in comparing HEI scores for specific subgroups of the population such as children and adolescents, older adults, and specific race-ethnic populations. Scores for children and older adults were recently made available on the CNPP website. HEI has also been used to score the U.S. Food Supply and to evaluate how USDA food distribution programs such as National School Lunch Program and Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations provide foods that align with the Dietary Guidelines.

This notice announces the Department’s annual adjustments to the Income Eligibility Guidelines to be used in determining eligibility for free and reduced price meals and free milk for the period from July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2017. These guidelines are used by schools, institutions, and facilities participating in the National School Lunch Program (and Commodity School Program), School Breakfast Program, Special Milk Program for Children, Child and Adult Care Food Program and Summer Food Service Program. The annual adjustments are required by section 9 of the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act. The guidelines are intended to direct benefits to those children most in need and are revised annually to account for changes in the Consumer Price Index.

The Food and Nutrition Service administers several programs that provide healthy food to children including the National School Lunch Program, the School Breakfast Program, the Child and Adult Care Food Program, the Summer Food Service Program, the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, and the Special Milk Program. Administered by State agencies, each of these programs helps fight hunger and obesity by reimbursing organizations such as schools, child care centers, and after-school programs for providing healthy meals to children.

This rule proposes to codify several provisions of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 affecting the integrity of the Child Nutrition Programs, including the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), the Special Milk Program for Children, the School Breakfast Program, the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) and State Administrative Expense Funds.

The Department is proposing to establish criteria for assessments against State agencies and program operators who jeopardize the integrity of any Child Nutrition Program; establish procedures for termination and disqualification of entities in the SFSP; modify State agency site review requirements in the CACFP; establish State liability for reimbursements incurred as a result of a State’s failure to conduct timely hearings in the CACFP; establish criteria for increased State audit funding for CACFP; establish procedures to prohibit the participation of entities or individuals terminated from any of the Child Nutrition Programs; establish serious deficiency and termination procedures for unaffiliated sponsored centers in the CACFP; eliminate cost-reimbursement food service management company contracts in the NSLP; and establish procurement training requirements for State agency and school food authority staff in the NSLP. In addition, this rulemaking would make several operational changes to improve oversight of an institution’s financial management and would also include several technical corrections to the regulations. The proposed rule is intended to improve the integrity of all Child Nutrition Programs.

The School Nutrition Association has a presence in every state across the country. View links to many of the stat. SNA’s 70th Annual National Conference (ANC) will be held July 10-13, 2016! Join more than 6,500 attendees, including school nutrition professionals, industry members and allied organization representatives at SNA’s premiere school nutrition event of the year. Come prepared for a fun, educational and thought-provoking experience in beautiful San Antonio, Texas!

The Event of The Year

Join thousands of your school nutrition peers for a four-day experience unlike anything else in the K-12 foodservice industry. When you walk through the doors of the Convention Center, you’ll quickly see why ANC is known as the “School Nutrition Event of the Year.”

Final Event

Be sure to pack your “retro best” outfit for the ANC Final Event. RAIN—a tribute to the Beatles—is a spectacular concert that will take you through the life and times of the world’s most celebrated band.

Education

With four days of education, discover countless choices to gain knowledge in the areas that have a direct impact on your job. Plus, you can kick-start your professional development a day early with pre-conference sessions.

Exhibit Hall

With over 200,000 square feet of exhibit space, the ANC Exhibit Hall is the place to discover the newest and most cutting-edge food, beverage, supply, equipment and service solutions to boost your school nutrition program’s menus and efficiency.

ANC Sweepstakes

Would you like a chance to win a free registration to ANC 2016 in San Antonio, Texas? Simply tell us how ANC helps you LEARN, LEAD & SUCCEED and you could win!

ONALASKA, Wis. – Here’s a scenario: You’re an Onalaska parent, and you give your high school student, Junior, $2 per day to buy lunch in the a la carte line.

You hope he chooses a balance of nutritious foods, but you have no way of knowing whether he’s blowing the whole $2 to buy cookies every day.

Next year, if you doubt Junior’s dining decisions, you need only phone somebody at the school district’s food service program to get a report of his a la carte purchases, thanks to a new software program approved Monday night by the Onalaska School Board.

The ability to generate such reports is only one advantage for the district, said Sue Black, who runs the food service program.

The Wordware software program, which already is being used in Holmen and West Salem, also will make it easier for the district to collect money and parents to pay money.

With the software, each family will have one account to cover any number of students. Parents deposit money into the account, and the students are each assigned a four-digit code they punch in when they get food at school.

Black said parents can pay for two weeks worth of lunches at a time or a whole semester, depending on their preference.

Parents will be notified, probably by mail at first, when it’s time to put more money into the account. Sometime next year, Black said, she hopes to have an automatic telephone notification system.

The software will mean less work for school personnel collecting the money and passing out lunch tickets, Black said.

Black said problems with students using another student’s code have been rare in other districts, and to make sure it doesn’t happen, Black plans to have a picture appear on the terminal that should match the face of the student who punches in the code.

The software will cost about $18,000, which will be paid for out of a $69,000 surplus in the food service fund. Superintendent John Burnett told the board that money could not be used to help with the district’s budget woes in the general fund.

In all, the food service budget will use $43,000 of that surplus next year, including money for new lunch-related equipment at the high school and Irving Pertzsch Elementary.

The board also approved a nickel per meal increase for next year, except for adult lunch prices.

In other business,

n The board approved a $429,550 capital improvements budget for next year, including $263,000 in spending given immediate approval. The other roughly $166,000 in spending must wait until at least October, at which time enrollment figures will be in and the district will have a better handle on its final budget.

The board approved establishment of an American Sign Language club at the high school next year.

The Osseo Middle School and Osseo High School will be starting an after school snack program. Every child who is attending an educational or enrichment activity, in an organized, structured, and supervised environment after the end of the school day during the school year is eligible for a free snack. A snack will be two of the four food components: milk, grain,fruit/veg, meat or meat alternate.

Lunch Account Information Osseo-Fair child uses a computerized program for breakfast, lunch and milk. To briefly review how the program works; each family will have a family account from which money is deducted each time a member of that family eats. If you have students in both the elementary and middle/senior high level, they will all be drawing off the same family account. This eliminates sending lunch money with each child. Parents can send money, or preferably a check, with one student for the entire family. A minimum deposit of $20 PER STUDENT is requested. If you would like to pay more, you can do so.

When a student eats or has milk, his/her lunch ID number is entered at the lunch line computer and the price of the purchase is deducted from their family account. Costs associated with the food service program are listed with the Student/Adult Fees in the Outlook. Please encourage your children to start their day off by participating in our breakfast program. Children who eat a nutritional breakfast tend to perform better at school. Breakfast is served before school each day. Cards for students in grades K-5 will be held by the students’ teachers until lunch time. Students in grades 6-12 will be responsible for their own cards. When a family’s balance reaches $20 or less, you will receive an e-mail notification that your balance is running low. If you do not have an e-mail address, a letter will be sent home with your child notifying you of your low balance. The letter will also inform the parents how many times each child has eaten and had milk. You can also obtain lunch account information by following the breakfast/lunch link on our school district website. You will need your family ID to retrieve this information. You can contact Carla at 715-597-3141 ext. 1413 with assistance on logging into your account.

We ask that you pay your first deposit before the start of school. You can pay in the High School Office from 8:00 a.m. to 12 noon and 1:00 p.m. to

4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday or send your deposit to: Osseo-Fairchild Schools, c/o Carla Sieg, 50851 East St., Osseo, WI 54758. Payments can also be made online through the Wordware website www.wordwareinc.com. Many families used the online payment option last year and seemed to like the convenience of it.

If you were not approved for free meals through direct certification, you should apply for free or reduced meals by returning the application which

was sent to you at the beginning of August. Applications may also be picked up at each school office. If you received a letter from us that indicated that you were approved for free meals due to Direct Certification with the State, you do not need to complete an application to receive free meals. In order to have as many applications approved before the start of school, please return your applicat555ion as soon as possible. If you were approved for free or reduced last year because of an application, you will need to complete a new application by October 13th to continue receiving benefits. If your form is not turned in by this date, you will be required to pay full price until you turn in your form and it is approved. Anyone who would like to send in payment (check or money order) or the free/reduced lunch form, please send them to the following address:

Osseo-Fairchild School District

Attention: Carla Sieg

50851 East St.

Osseo, WI 54758

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Carla in the High School Office. Her phone number is 715-597-3141 ext. 1413.

Please try to deposit money and turn in applications prior to the start of school. Your cooperation is greatly appreciated!

Just A Bite

Handling A “Choosy” Eater “Choosy” eating is a child-size step toward growing up and showing independence. In fact, what seems like a challenge to you may be an early step towards making food choices. A child’s “NO” does not always mean no. What seems “choosy” may just be your child’s awkward first steps in learning to make decisions.

In looking at the development of school lunch programs with integration of school lunch software, one theme becomes evident. Students perform better in the classroom if they are properly nourished. Going back to Europe in pre-US colonial times, the first evidence of a food program started because a teacher wanted to feed his students a nutritious meal on a tight budget. Over the years, different cities and countries in Europe gradually developed systems for feeding hungry children so they could study better.

Today’s national food program in the US has roots in many small food services across the country, sponsored by churches, home societies, associations and the like. Most were genuinely concerned about hungry and needy children. In 1904 Robert Hunter wrote in his book Poverty that “every child shall be given a certain amount of instruction, let us render it possible for them to receive it” meaning ‘feed them’. School’s lunch software provides ease and fast process of lunch distribution.

Flash forward to today. There have been frequent headlines, social media posts gone viral, and news reports on the benefits of the new nutrition guidelines for schools. What is interesting, in light of why we provide nourishment to our future workforce, is that no one seems to be asking the teachers if it is making a difference. Are students overall performing better? Are reading, writing and mathematics skills improving because, at least in part, we have a well-fed school population? Questions worth asking, don’t you think? This all is possible with the help of nutrition software, named lunch cashier system. Only school lunch software,in the industry which works on Windows, MAC, Chromebook. Wordware is continually developing their nutrition software to meet and exceed the needs and demands of our customers across multiple settings. Based on our customer needs and technology environments, we have created a fully web based program that will run on any HTML5 device and can be deployed as a fully cloud based solution or on an appliance. What does that mean to you? You can deploy our software any way you choose without a major investment in your infrastructure.

Wordware dedicated for providing best nutrition software to the schools for the health of students and to make worry free their parents.

Reference:

National School Lunch Program, Background and Development, by Gordon W. Gunderson, 06/17/2014

The Wordware mission with Lunch Cashier system for School District ‘s is to actively contribute to the health of children, district staff, lunch cafeteria staff, students and other eligible customers by preparing, marketing and food service cafeteria software application.. Nutritious meals will be offered at a free and reduced price for eligible students while maintaining a financially accountable program.

Wordware Lunch Cashier system assists with your staff and parents to the new lunchroom software and is always here to help with any questions that may come up encounter while the process or after implementation Schools quickly learned how helpful our team is from the beginning and they are pleased with the technical support being provided by wordware’s experienced and dedicated technical staff. Wordware Support Team set up the software for the schools and provide training to your school staff up to the level they needed to learn the ins and outs of our school cafeteria software. From the launch of the new software, School Food Service Directors, was happy that Wordware Lunch Cashier system would be an excellent fit for the children in their school.

“The implementation team and trainers did a great job getting us set up and ready for the first day of school,” say many of our valuable customers. Furthermore, their Staff have not encountered any problems, but they called for general questions. Customer care representative attends the phones calls promptly and guide them with confidence in using the lunchroom management software than before. They all are extremely satisfied that with the of wordware customer support team.

“There are many reasons why using Wordware for our lunch software has made my job easier. The remote support and ticket system have been a life saver on many occasions. The Direct Certification is simplified and the Free and Reduced timeline has kept me on track. The upgrade to the LCS1000 Mayflower has everything I need on the family dashboard for quick and easy reference. There are letter templates that can be customized by you and the numerous reporting options available are a tremendous help in documenting the daily and monthly transaction activities.” – Jean Erd, School District of Menomonee Falls

The Lunch Cashier System by Wordware, Inc. is a complete, affordable, user-friendly meal accounting system for schools, including back-office and point-of-sale management software. Lunch Cashier System is one of the Top Food Service Management Software. They provide comprehensive solutions to both school administration and food service staff. Computerized Lunch Program for school cafeterias, State and Federal reporting. Parents only need to send lunch money to one family account for all family members participating in the lunch program.

Wordware mission with Lunch Cashier system for School District ‘s is to actively contribute to the health of children, district staff, lunch cafeteria staff, students and other eligible customers by preparing, marketing and food service cafeteria software application.. Nutritious meals will be offered at a free and reduced price for eligible students while maintaining a financially accountable program.

Wordware Lunch Cashier system assists with your staff and parents to the new lunchroom software and is always here to help with any questions that may come up encounter while the process or after implementation Schools quickly learned how helpful our team is from the beginning and they are pleased with the technical support being provided by wordware’s experienced and dedicated technical staff. Wordware Support Team set up the software for the schools and provide training to your school staff up to the level they needed to learn the ins and outs of our school cafeteria software. From the launch of the new software, School Food Service Directors, was happy that Wordware Lunch Cashier system would be an excellent fit for the children in their school.

“The implementation team and trainers did a great job getting us set up and ready for the first day of school,” say many of our valuable customers. Furthermore, their Staff have not encountered any problems, but they called for general questions. Customer care representative attends the phones calls promptly and guide them with confidence in using the lunchroom management software than before. They all are extremely satisfied that with the of wordware customer support team.

“There are many reasons why using Wordware for our lunch software has made my job easier. The remote support and ticket system have been a life saver on many occasions. The Direct Certification is simplified and the Free and Reduced timeline has kept me on track. The upgrade to the LCS1000 Mayflower has everything I need on the family dashboard for quick and easy reference. There are letter templates that can be customized by you and the numerous reporting options available are a tremendous help in documenting the daily and monthly transaction activities.” – Jean Erd, School District of Menomonee Falls

The Lunch Cashier System by Wordware, Inc. is a complete, affordable, user-friendly meal accounting system for schools, including back-office and point-of-sale management software. Lunch Cashier System is one of the Top Food Service Management Software. They provide comprehensive solutions to both school administration and food service staff. Computerized Lunch Program for school cafeterias, State and Federal reporting. Parents only need to send lunch money to one family account for all family members participating in the lunch program.